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Thursday, April 30, 2015

Leaked Report: French Troops Raped Starving Children in Central Africa

According
to a report leaked by a (now suspended) United Nations aid worker,
French peacekeeping troops in the Central African Republic have been
accused of raping and sodomizing the same “starving and homeless young
boys” they were supposed to have been protecting.

The
children described how they were sexually exploited in return for food
and money. One 11-year-old boy said he was abused when he went out
looking for food. A nine-year-old described being sexually abused with
his friend by two French soldiers at the IDP camp when they went to a
checkpoint to look for something to eat.

The
child described how the soldiers forced him and his friend to carry out
a sex act. The report describes how distressed the child was when
disclosing the abuse and how he fled the camp in terror after the
assault. Some of the children were able to give good descriptions of the
soldiers involved.

Anders
Kompass, the aid worker who leaked the report, gave the gruesome
document to the Aids Free World advocacy group, which is now seeking an
internal inquiry into how the UN handles abuse cases. As the group’s
co-director, Paula Donovan, explained to The Guardian,
“The UN’s instinctive response to sexual violence in its ranks –
ignore, deny, cover up, dissemble – must be subjected to a truly
independent commission of inquiry with total access, top to bottom, and
full subpoena power.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is expected to address the situation later tonight from Paris.